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John, I no longer practice law and when I did it was entirely civil law. Although the same argument you make applies there too. I anticipated the issue you raise well before attending law school. My answer is that we are all best served in proceeding as though there is free will. Civilization will go %$*?!kerfluey without the belief. If you posit strict determinism the idea of choice is just silly. On the other hand I cant escape the idea that humans are ill-equipped to understand the nature of reality if such even exists. Our simplistic ideas of causal and a-causal may no be accurate. I have no confidence in humans ever getting to the bottom of things. Perhaps with the aid of artificial intelligence we will. Just dont know.

I am no fan of your moral relativism but I give you credit for being logical in carrying out the implications of an idea. You are likely in select company. Then again why give anyone credit or demerits?

I was listening to Brian Greene on the radio. Just ordered his most recent book too. He was discussing a super collider experiment which could verify some aspect of string theory if the wham bam collision causes matter to escape our universe.

Yeah, I can't claim any credit for my own thoughts, be they logical or otherwise.

I'm tempted to agree with the sentiment that, until or unless we know one way or another, we should act as if we do have free will. But it made me think of something Ron Paul said during one of the debates not too many weeks ago. He was talking about legalizing drugs, not just marijuana but all of them, and allowing people to reap the consequences of their own actions. The moderator of the debate was suprised at what he was saying, but Paul responded by asking the crowd how many of them would go out and shoot up if heroine were suddenly legal. No one raised their hands, which may have simply been because they were in a public setting, but I think not. I think if there were suddenly no law, people wouldn't behave all that differently than they do now.

The reason I think that is because I think most people already do what they want regardless of laws. Many will to say that they are law abiding citizens, but when it comes down to the nitty-gritty of their lives, I think we'd be hard pressed to find anyone who was not regularly breaking quite a few laws. Think of how often we speed, or roll through a stop sign because we don't think we'll get caught. How many of us have never littered, or cussed in public, or gotten in a fight, or downloaded pirated media? I'd bet its not many of us, even though there are laws about all that stuff. We're all as self-serving as we can get away with being. And most of what prevents us from getting away with everything we want isn't law enforcers (how often do you call the cops to settle your issues?), it's the presence and interference of other people. Regular people, who aren't stopping us with lines of legal code, but with their own self-serving nature; their unwillingness to let someone else infringe on their lives.

If everyone acknowledged that they have no freedom and no control, I think we'd all pretty much go about living our lives as we already do. In fact, I don't think we'd have any choice in the matter, lol. We'd continue to be compelled by the same chemistry as has been compelling us since the beginning of time. And even if there were drastic changes in our chemistry and thus our behavior, it would not be because we changed our thinking, but the other way around. Our thinking and behavior would have changed because the chemistry compelling us had arrived at pricisely those new configurationa.

But I suppose if we consider things in this light, it makes no sense to speak of whether or not we should believe in choice, since whether or not we believe in it is not even our choice. Sweet irony! We do as we will, but cannot will what we will.

Hmm, intense lady, but good points. for me arguing is kinda pointless, especially when it comes to religion with a theist. Id rather accentuate and affirm them when they think right, like someone telling them heaven is down instead of up and them questioning it. then when they're on a thought pattern of god I ask why they no longer question. but one day when people realize the smog must be blown away I'm sure rational minds will prevail... or that's just me being an optimist.